Turbulence at UNSW

Rory Hume's departure from the University of NSW - just 20 months into his five-year, $750,000-a-year contract as vice-chancellor - gives the institution time to heal wounds opened by the Bruce Hall affair.

Professor Hume was on a hiding to nothing after influential players on UNSW's governing council sided with influential leaders of its medical fraternity in denouncing the vice-chancellor's December decision not to sack Professor Hall over allegations of fraudulent immunology research. The scandal drew a line through UNSW's governance and academic apparatus, snaring the country's highest-paid academic in a terminal contest of wills.

The fall of Professor Hume, however, goes to issues beyond his ham-fisted arbitration of the Hall matter. It raises questions about whether a vice-chancellor, as CEO, should have freer passage in determining his or her university's strategies for the higher education challenges ahead and whether university councils are optimally structured and sufficiently expert to envisage and achieve the finest teaching and research.

The UNSW council was aggrieved by the propensity of the Hume predecessor, John Niland, to disregard it. But he was credited with elevating UNSW to at least equal footing with Sydney University. Now, the Australian-born Professor Hume, recruited from UCLA, where he was second in charge, has followed. That Professor Hume did not see eye-to-eye with all is not a detriment. That he was given to extolling the US experience with higher education was not idle boasting. Only the small-minded would hold that Australian universities do not have much to learn from the US. Professor Hume championed specialisation by universities, saw virtue in adequately rewarding teaching staff and raised colleagues' hackles by overturning the ban on full-fee-paying local students, thereby demonstrating that at least he understood the great risks posed to a university's quality by underresourcing.

But his arbitration of the Hall scandal was his undoing. The university spent at least $1.5 million on an inquiry, headed by the former chief justice of Australia, Gerard Brennan. It concluded Professor Hall acted with "intent to deceive or in reckless disregard of the truth", had "seriously deviated" from reporting norms and had wilfully "stated a material or significant falsehood". Professor Hume says he was legally bound to consider the Brennan findings as accusations open to challenge and re-examination. He found Professor Hall guilty of academic (but not scientific) misconduct and censured him for mistakes Professor Hume said did not amount to hanging offences.

But the whole sorry mess sullied the UNSW's reputation and Professor Hume could not escape his share of blame. He has gone. So too are the prospects offered by his impressive CV. His departure will help the bickering subside but questions of how UNSW shapes for the future are not so easily erased. In the circumstances, they are made only more pressing.

Winning in Indonesia

No one won last week's Indonesian elections. As elections go, it was one of the largest and most complicated exercises in the history of modern democracy. Almost half a million candidates put their names to national, provincial and local ballot papers across three time zones, taking in some of most remote polling booths on earth. With slow counting continuing, it appears that at least seven parties will have to squeeze their rivalries into the new parliament. The building of a stable coalition government - without a single, dominant force - now poses a very considerable challenge for the fractious political elite.

The legacies of Indonesia's rival post-independence strongmen are locked in an uninspiring draw. Support for the PDI-P of President Megawati Soekarnoputri, the daughter of the independence leader and former president Soekarno, had slumped to just over 20 per cent, with half the vote counted. Golkar, the party machine of the man who deposed Soekarno, the former authoritarian president Soeharto, was just 0.37 per cent behind.

Support for both parties is tinged with nostalgia for the strong leadership of the past. In governing, Soekarno and Soeharto drew heavily on the Indonesian tradition of "mufakat", often misleadingly translated as consensus. In practice, it usually means decisions are taken by acquiescence to the opinion of the most powerful figure at the table. This tradition has left too many politicans ill-prepared for the compromises, open debate and delicate negotiations coalition politics demands.

PDI-P may yet beat Golkar by a small margin. However, Ms Megawati's outgoing government was so hobbled by divisions that policy-making and governance faltered. Many PDI-P officials were also accused of taking up where Soeharto's Golkar team left off - with their hands in the national till. The stain of corruption over the two largest political parties, however, means smaller parties may have enhanced leverage. The newcomers most favourably placed are the Democrats and Justice and Welfare parties. The unexpected success of "clean government" campaigns, and the rapid rise of the popular Democrats leader, Ret. Gen Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, will put pressure on all parties to match their promises of reform.

The political "cow trading", as Indonesians call it, will be a fraught, drawn-out process. Much now rides on Indonesia's first direct presidential elections in July, which will hand one leader a popular mandate to manage the fractured parliament. Last Monday's polls were only Indonesia's third free elections in almost 50 years. Their successful completion is, itself, an win for Indonesia and another firm step away the authoritarian past.